


Ice-cream

by LSDAndKizuki



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Mountains, Uh... there isn't really anything else taggable...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-16
Updated: 2017-02-16
Packaged: 2018-09-25 00:29:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 619
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9794381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LSDAndKizuki/pseuds/LSDAndKizuki
Summary: A vignette about mountains and ice-cream cones





	

**Author's Note:**

> This one's a little weirder than usual... I wanted to get something short and quick out of me, that could fit on a page. Voila

When he was young, mountains were like upside-down ice cream cones: huge, conical things, which you had to clutch and cling to in order to climb, before balancing on one toe at the top, then sliding down their smooth sides.

This image had embedded itself in his poor mind, all because of a diagram he saw in a classroom at the age of four. The diagram showed the relative sizes of Ben Nevis, Mont Blanc, Kilimanjaro and Mt Everest as flat, concentric triangles: a Russian doll of peaks. Ben Nevis was the tiny baby doll; Mt Everest was its cavernous and huge great-grand-mother. So to him, a flat-land city boy, this was mountains: big, brown ice cream cones missing their ice cream. He occasionally saw a picture of the Egyptian pyramids, and falsely identified them as mountains. First impressions are hard things to shake. Overall, he had seen far more rounded, uneven images of mountains than straight-edged ones, but this did not matter. He could never quite imagine a mountain without seeing the triangle first and the snow-capped crags second.

Imagine the bloom of disappointment which waxed inside him when he climbed a mountain for the first time. It seemed insignificant against the thrill, the intrigue, and the sheer endorphin rush of success and relief, but it was there alright. He did not, he found, have to balance on tip-toes at the summit in order to stay grounded. There was nowhere to fall, and like the smallest tear in a bouncy castle, this took the fun out of it for him.

But don’t feel too sorry for the boy. He was soon fully educated, and was assured that there  _were_ jagged mountains out there – never perfect ice-cream cone-shaped, but pointed and sheer enough to require a great deal of balancing. Many were dangerous. On these mountains you were liable to fall if you did not keep your centre of gravity in the right place. His interest in mountains was reignited with a vengeance; he began to climb them in earnest, bigger and scarier and sheerer and sharper. It never really occurred to him that there was a small part of his mind, hidden behind a door, which would never forget that age-old lust. It was the desire to see that perfect geometry of the isosceles climb: smooth scale upwards, knife-sharp summit, a loss of balance, and a ceaseless plummet to the bottom.

When he finally lost his balance, in a single misjudgement of footing, it seemed as though that door opened. The physical panic probably overthrew him more than gravity. Picture it: his legs buckled in a useless spasm upwards, as his arms windmilled helplessly, and vertigo drenched him, like falling headfirst and backwards into sickly water… And with it, with his brain’s shell-shocked slowing down of time, there was a rising euphoria. Now he would fall. Deep down, he realised in the eye of the hurricane of fear, this was what he always wanted. Never the climb, but the payoff.

You want to know why he never found peace when he died? Mountains aren’t ice-cream cones, that’s why. He knew that in his head, but never in his heart. And so, when he landed somewhere miles and miles above ground, instead of in a heap at the very bottom, it got to him. He stayed up there in the cold, among the glacial stretches and crevasses, and he looked at the horizon, wondering why he was not level with it. He is still there now, unable to land or find ground. He sits on high, confused, and sometimes he makes a triangle with his thumbs and forefingers, and looks through it as though he might find an answer.


End file.
